Speed Racer Learns from Manga, Can Teach Feature Animation a Few Things

I'm generally not a fan of live-action adaptations of animated TV shows, because they almost always disappoint. The problems usually start with the choices the filmmakers make in order to get animated (or animated-looking) characters into a live action universe. The Flintstones had fake-looking rock sets; Alvin and the Chipmunks and Scooby Doo had CGI critters in an otherwise realistic universe; Fat Albert had the TV characters coming to life in the real world.

In Speed Racer, the Wachowskis do what none of the creators of these other films had the will to do: they created a cohesive universe in which all of the elements in any given frame look like they belong together. In the process, they also highlight something that's been missing from mainstream animation for quite some time.

As I was sitting in the cinema watching Speed Racer, it occurred to me that I already knew how most journalists were going to describe the movie's look. Some would say that it looks like a video game, or that it's anime come to life. They're dead wrong. Outside of some race scenes the movie looks nothing like any video game you've actually played, and outside of a few Akira-like shots and a nod to the original series opener, it looks nothing like any anime you've ever seen. Really, these are just phrases that reviewers use when they want to say that there are lots of things moving around very fast, or that have bright-coloured, futuristic-looking elements.

In a strange way, however, they're also right. Speed Racer, like many video games, demands that its viewers process a lot of visual information at once. Like anime, it stylizes motion in a way that isn't entirely realistic but is believable within its own reality.

If anything, Speed Racer's filmic cues come from green-screen/digital-set movies like the most recent Star Wars trilogy and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, along with shorts that feature heavily processed and manipulated live action, like Gaëlle Denis' City Paradise. But the Wachowskis' real inspiration here is manga. This doesn't just apply to the racing scenes, but to just about anything set outside of the Racer family home. Take a look at these images, and pay special attention to how they put the focus on certain foreground objects or characters and use the backgrounds to denote movement, atmosphere and mood, These compositions are pure manga:







Better still are the transitions, in which the camera moves around a foreground character's head and the backgrounds change to show scenes either as a transition or as a flashback to the past. Some of these scenes are multi-layered, including audio from both the current time and place and the location or time being referenced. There's even one scene where one character tells Speed about about something that will happen in the future; as the camera whirls around Speed, the background shifts to show scenes that highlight what the other character is saying—and eventually we discover this isn't speculation, but what actually happens in the future. The whole sequence interleaves between the present moment and flash-forwards, kind of like an episode of Lost on, well, speed. (Lazy journalists will look at all this and make references to audience members with short attention spans or ADD; the truth is, you really have to pay attention if you want to follow it all.)

I'm just scratching the surface here. All in all, Speed Racer is a visual effects spectacle that doesn't reserve its inventiveness for eye-candy money shots; rather, it's a carefully constructed, dynamic reality that is unlike anything seen on the big screen. All of which brings me to the question I kept asking myself when I left the cinema: why haven't I seen anything like this in feature animation for so long?

It's a cliché these days to say that effects-heavy summer movies are cartoon-like, and there's some truth to that. But it's also true that live-action movies have, through the heavy use of CGI, taken animation's "anything can happen here" mentality and run with it. Meanwhile, feature animation has largely concerned itself with looking more realistic, obsessing over things like realistic fur and hair. Even those productions that aren't so fixated are, relatively speaking, conservative. I've very much enjoyed Pixar's films, but when you get right down to it they mostly fit into a niche best described as "Talking ____s," with the blank filled in by toys, bugs, fish, rats or what have you. The Incredibles was an exciting departure, but so far the new direction that it signalled appears to be a dead end.

Where's the wow? Where's that moment when you jump up in your seat, excited because you've been shown something you've never seen before? Speed Racer provides that in spades, but in feature animation it's been sorely lacking. I remember seeing Tron in 1983, Akira in 1988 and Mind Game in 2005 and each time feeling like someone had redefined what was possible in animated cinema because I was being shown things I hadn't seen before. I've had that same feeling many times over since then, but when it comes to animation it's generally been in OAVs, shorts and—much to my surprise—television.

I'm all for the blurring of boundaries, but to me movies like Speed Racer indicate that feature animation is ceding ground to live action. Something is very wrong with this picture.

[Cross-posted from Frames Per Second.]

The Top 15 Vaporware Products of All Time

The tech industry has had more than its fair share of products that infamously failed to take off. Some fit the classic definition of vaporware, and were all hype and no substance. A few were simply too far ahead of their time. And others were merely victims of bad judgment about what users wanted. Here are the 15 best examples of products that never saw the light of day (at least in their originally intended form), plus some honorable mentions that we just couldn't ignore.

15. Ovation
The early 1980s was an interesting time in office-software development for IBM's still-new IBM PC and the MS-DOS operating system. WordStar, WordPerfect, Microsoft Word, and Lotus 1-2-3 were just some of the must-have word processing and spreadsheet titles released in the three years after the platform made its debut.

In 1983, Ovation Technologies, a startup founded the year before, announced an integrated package that promised to include word processing, spreadsheet, database management, and communications software. By 1984, though, the company declared bankruptcy, having burned through about $7 million in investor money without releasing a single product.

The problem was one that might be familiar to survivors of the dot-com bust: Ovation spent far more time, money, and energy promoting and selling its product than actually creating it. The software's only lasting effect on the market is that it's supposedly the reason "vaporware" was coined.

14. Duke Nukem Forever
It's hard to come up with something new to say about Duke Nukem Forever, largely because people have had so much time to make fun of it. Last week marked the eleventh anniversary of 3D Realms' first official announcement of Duke Nukem Forever's release, which was supposed to be in mid-1998. That optimistic announcement came before the developer's decision to switch game engines—something the company would go on to do repeatedly in the ensuing years, while occasionally rewriting most of the existing game design from scratch.

Over the last ten years, the developer has released a few trailers (including one last December), screen shots, and demos to show the game's progress. Though 3D Realms wisely stopped providing hard release dates (it'll be released "when it's done"), president Scott Miller did confirm a 2008 release date in an e-mail sent to the Dallas Business Journal back in February. Still, as the years have gone by, each new tidbit has prompted increasing amounts of snide commentary rather than anticipation. The best of the bunch has to be The Duke Nukem Forever List, which documents how the gaming and technology industries—as well as the world at large—have changed since that first announcement in 1997.

If Duke Nukem Forever does actually see the light of day—which may surprise its creators as much as anyone else—its role of whipping boy in the world of tech snarkiness might be filled by Darkfall, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) in development for almost seven years ... so far.

13. Amiga Walker PC
No list of technologies that almost made it would be complete without something from the Commodore Amiga's tortured history—one in which remarkable hardware was often tripped up by questionable marketing decisions, bad circumstances, or some mixture of both.

After Commodore went bankrupt in 1994, the Amiga brand and technology were purchased by the German company Escom Technologies and marketed as Amiga Technologies. In early 1996, the company announced a plan to sell an upgraded version of the Amiga 1200 computer with a strikingly designed dark purple case that stood on four tiny feet—hence the Walker name.

Was it genius or madness? Even the company didn't seem sure, as it also intended to offer the motherboard separately, so that people could buy it and put it in a standard PC case. The reaction of the Amiga faithful was mixed, with some saying the case looked like a beetle, or Doctor Who's K-9.

We'll never know if the Walker would have swayed the Amiga community or not; only a few prototypes were built before Escom went bankrupt in 1997.

12. Sega VR
Before the madness of the dot-com boom really got under way, the serious buzz was all about virtual reality. Aside from the movie The Lawnmower Man and VR cafés springing up in tech-friendly cities, a potential battle was shaping up between two giants of the video game industry, both aiming to bring the wonders of virtual reality gaming to the home.

Sega had decided to create the Sega VR as a virtual-reality add-on to its wildly popular Genesis system. Although the twin-LCD headset made the player look like a cross between Battlestar Galactica's Cylons and Knight Rider's KITT, it was one of the sleeker-looking VR headsets of the day. And, by all accounts, that was the best thing about it. Despite ambitious specs, including 320-by-200-pixel resolution, head tracking, and a color display, the few people who tried the system outside of Sega—mostly at trade shows—were far from impressed. While the Sega VR did meet its specs on paper, in practice the images were a blurry mess. The company scrapped the project in 1994. (But not before making an arrangement to offer the Sega VR as a prize in an Alpha-Bits cereal contest. What the winner actually got is a mystery.)

Sega probably breathed a sigh of relief when a year later Nintendo's Virtual Boy also flopped spectacularly (check out the original Virtual Boy TV commercial).

11. Glaze3D Graphics Cards
Graphics card makers have always played a game of spec leapfrog, with each company squeezing higher resolutions and higher frame rates out of graphics chips as new technologies appear and components become smaller and cheaper.

In 1999, the Finnish company Bitboys Oy announced the first two cards using its Glaze3D architecture, with even the less-powerful of the pair promising render speeds that were spectacular by the standards of the day. They weren't playing leapfrog so much as doing long jumps. The not-so-secret secret behind the Glaze3D family's amazing performance numbers was that the chips relied heavily on embedded DRAM, bypassing the bottlenecks that came from using external memory.

While the numbers were enough to inflame any gamer's ardor—including Apple gamers, as the Glaze3D family promised to be Mac-compatible—the overall reaction to the news could best be described as cautious optimism; many people adopted an "I'll believe it when I see it" attitude. Still, most folks gave Bitboys the benefit of the doubt. After all, the company and the people behind it already had a reputation for their graphics architecture work, and they had partnered with Infineon Technologies to produce the chips. Would Bitboys' unconventional method actually work?

We'll never know. For two years, the company missed release dates. Of course, during those two years the rest of the industry didn't sit still. As new technologies came along (for one thing, DirectX went from version 7 to version 9), Bitboys promised that Glaze3D would support them; the company also increased its performance claims, adding a third, even more powerful chip to the family. Ultimately (mercifully?) everything came to a halt when Infineon stopped producing embedded DRAM in 2001; lacking a manufacturer, Bitboys threw in the towel. Bitboys went on to produce processor designs for the mobile graphics market, and ATI acquired the company in 2006.

10. Atari 2700
Someone at Atari had a great idea: Take the insanely popular Atari 2600 gaming system, put it in a new cabinet, add spiffy new controllers, and call it the Atari 2700.

The end result was almost a license to print money. The cabinet designers skipped the dated 1970s look of the faux-wood panel and went for a then-futuristic sleek, wedge-shaped design with matte and glossy black finishes, topped with a built-in storage container for the controllers at the top.

The controllers themselves were innovative for the time, featuring built-in select and reset buttons (providing even less motivation to get off the couch), a touch-sensitive fire button, and a joystick that doubled as a rotating, 270-degree paddle. The killer feature: The controllers were wireless.

Advertising and packaging were created, but the Atari 2700 never reached store shelves. In quality assurance testing people noticed that the controllers had a broadcast range of 1000 feet. Since the controllers didn't have unique identifiers beyond "left controller" and "right controller," playing a game would affect any Atari 2700 unit within that radius. To top it off, the electronics were based on garage-door openers, so interference with other remote-control devices was a possibility. In the end Atari decided that redesigning the system and the controllers would be too expensive, and it scrapped the 2700 project.

The 2700 didn't exactly vanish without a trace, however. The cabinet design was slightly retooled for the Atari 5200, and the 5200 controllers also used elements of the 2700 controller design. The wireless functionality wound up in an Atari 2600 add-on, which relied on essentially unusable fat-bottomed versions of the classic 2600 joystick.

9. Secure Digital Music Initiative
In the late 1990s, the MP3 format and Napster—the original, bad-boy Napster—had the music industry running scared. While the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) was in the middle of its lawsuit against Diamond Multimedia over that company's Rio MP3 player, a consortium of computer, consumer electronics, and entertainment companies got together to form the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI).

The goal was to create a new digital music format that would incorporate watermarking files as a means of digital rights management (DRM), as well as a standard for audio players so that they wouldn't play SDMI-compliant files that the owner didn't have the right to listen to. This arrangement would, theoretically, provide the safety net required for the music companies to start distributing music digitally.

In late 2000, the group offered a $10,000 prize to any person or group that could, among other things, successfully remove the watermarks on four music files they provided, within a three-week time limit.

A team at Princeton led by computer science professor Ed Felten did just that. The SDMI threatened to sue Felten, citing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), when the group learned that he planned to discuss his research at the 4th International Information Hiding Workshop the following year. The Electronic Frontier Foundation backed Felten by suing the RIAA, SDMI, Verance (one of the companies whose watermarking technology was cracked), and the U.S. Justice Department on First Amendment grounds.

Felten presented the paper at the 10th USENIX Security Symposium a few months later—but by then the SDMI's prospects had dimmed, and it soon dissolved altogether.

8. Action GameMaster
Active Enterprises was a gaming company that valued quantity over quality, releasing cartridges for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) and Sega Genesis jammed with 52 games, each of dubious quality. The Action GameMaster, which Active announced in 1994, was no deviation from the philosophy. The portable game system would not only play its own cartridges but would also handle NES, Super NES, and Sega Genesis games (with the help of adapters), as well as CD-ROM games, via another adapter. Contributing to the kitchen-sink approach were a TV tuner add-on and car and AC adapters. (Even with all that functionality, Active claimed that the GameMaster would have "light weight portability.")

Despite a wildly enthusiastic press kit distributed at 1994's Consumer Electronics Show, the Action GameMaster failed to materialize. Small wonder, considering it would never have been able to license the required hardware from Nintendo or Sega. And even its own concept design revealed that Active's concept of "portable" was clearly different from the rest of the gaming world's: If the company's claim of a 3.2-inch LCD could be taken at its word, the design suggested that the Action GameMaster would be at least 10 inches wide and 8 inches long. The company, which was likely banking on a flood of orders that never came, disappeared soon after.

7. Infinium Phantom
Sometimes a product name is just too perfect. Almost from the moment that Infinium Labs' January 2003 press release announced the Phantom, a console that would "outperform the Xbox, Sony PlayStation 2, and GameCube," it encountered skepticism.

The release was chock-full of tech marketing jargon yet remained entirely free of details about the Phantom itself—while promising a March unveiling and a November launch.

Details did emerge soon after: The Phantom was slated to be, in essence, a PC running the embedded version of Windows XP, which would allow gamers to play PC games—but the primary hook was Phantom's on-demand system, where subscribers could download any game they wanted over an Internet connection. At one stage, the company even planned to give the console away free to anyone who subscribed to a two-year service.

Bloggers and forum posters had a field day with the Phantom, deriding the lack of a physical product or any reliable information on Infinium.

Imagine everyone's surprise when a Phantom unit was actually shown at 2004's E3 trade show, complete with the wireless LapBoard (a keyboard and mouse that fit on a tilting tray), and a new launch date—which, of course, came and went with no Phantom.

A revamped Phantom was on display at the 2005 Consumer Electronics Show, but a string of missed and reset release dates eroded any goodwill that its public appearances may have generated. Later in the year, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) gave notice that it would bring charges against former Infinium CEO Timothy Roberts. The SEC filing several months later revealed that Infinium had lost over $62.7 million in three years, with only $3.5 million going to actual development. A few months after that, Infinium officially ended the Phantom project, changed its name to Phantom Entertainment, and focused its efforts on the LapBoard—which, despite an order from Alienware, has yet to materialize.

6. Apple Interactive Television Box
These days we watch movies on game consoles, browse Web sites on our mobile phones, and listen to music on, well, just about anything. But for the longest time so-called convergence was always just out of reach, and the Holy Grail of the convergence craze was interactive television, where couch potatoes could, say, visit a company's Web site when it was displayed during a commercial, or vote on the outcome of a TV show while watching it. (No, American Idol hadn't been launched yet.)

In 1993, Apple partnered with British Telecom (now BT) and Belgacom to produce a set-top box to go along with their interactive television services. The Apple Interactive Television Box was a modified 25-MHz Macintosh LC-475, and, rather modestly, allowed users to download and watch content (and fast-forward or rewind, similar to today's TiVo-style recorders). Future plans included interactive game shows and educational content for children, as well as add-on hardware such as a mouse, a keyboard, and a CD-ROM drive.

In 1994, selected households in Britain and Belgium placed the black set-top box sporting an Apple logo on top of their TVs, and trials began a year later in the United States. Apple quickly learned that consumers simply weren't interested in interactive television.

The trials ended, and the Interactive Television Box was shelved. Fast-forward to 2008 (skipping 1996's Internet-enabled but failed Apple Pippin @World gaming console), and the company's sleek Apple TV media streamer lets you rent HD and standard-definition iTunes Store videos directly from your TV.

5. Palm Foleo
Palm Computing's founder, Jeff Hawkins, is a lucky guy. What few people have done once—define a product category—he has done twice, first with the original PalmPilot PDA and later with Handspring's Treo smart phone. (Both categories existed before Hawkins' inventions, but Palm's products made them accessible enough for nontechnophiles to latch on to.)

On May 30, 2007, Hawkins went for the hat trick when he announced the Palm Foleo, a $499 Linux-based subnotebook designed to synchronize with a smart phone so that business travelers could, among other things, work on documents and e-mail without cramping their thumbs.

Even such notable features as its 2.5-pound weight and its instant-on feature failed to muster more than a collective "Why?" from the digerati. Stuck somewhere between a PDA and a notebook in power and size, it seemed to be only an extra device to carry around, with too much feature overlap.

Our own Editor in Chief Harry McCracken was part of the vocal minority who thought that the Foleo was being hastily prejudged, and hands-on reviews alternated between positive and negative. Barely three months after Hawkins presented the Foleo, Palm pulled the plug on it, citing a need to "get our core platform and smartphones done first." McCracken agreed, writing that the "Foleo was likely to be a distraction at a time when Palm couldn't afford to be distracted—and probably a LifeDrive-like flop, too."

Some people might argue that Hawkins could yet be vindicated, as low-cost, lightweight laptops such as the Asus Eee PC seem to be catching on despite being underpowered—good enough for some tasks, but not as feature-packed as a full-featured notebook.

4. Taligent and Microsoft Cairo
Steve Jobs, ousted from Apple's board of directors, left the company in 1986 and founded NeXT Computer. In 1989, NeXT released its first computer to great acclaim. Though the NeXT computer was only a modest commercial success, its launch and the technology it demonstrated (including the advanced NeXTSTEP operating system) galvanized three companies in particular: Apple, IBM, and Microsoft.

What NeXT had done, seemingly out of nowhere, was create an object-oriented operating system. (Among other things, such a design makes reusing programming code easier.) Apple had already started work in 1987 on an object-oriented operating system code-named Pink, but was struggling against internal politics to deliver anything even close to a finished product.

In 1992, the Pink project moved to Taligent, a joint venture between Apple and IBM. IBM, having recently parted ways with Microsoft over OS/2, had already started work on a microkernel called WorkplaceOS. Taligent merged the work on Pink and WorkplaceOS, with the intent of releasing a multiplatform operating system named TalOS.

While the group did eventually release an object-oriented programming environment named CommonPoint for OS/2 and various flavors of Unix, the actual Taligent operating system never surfaced. The company was absorbed into IBM in 1998.

In 1991, Microsoft launched the Cairo project—by several accounts, as a direct response to NeXT. Cairo promised a distributed, object-oriented file system (Object File Store, or OFS) that indexed a computer or network's file structure and contents automatically.

Several versions of Windows NT came and went as Cairo continued development, shifting targets all the while. Eventually the company referred to Cairo as the successor to Windows NT Server, and then as a collection of technologies. Cairo development ended in 1996.

Incidentally, two of these object-oriented ventures ended up generating technologies that lots of people use today. Bits and pieces of Cairo (in addition to conventions from Mac OS and NeXTSTEP) helped inspire the Windows 95 interface, and formed the building blocks for Exchange, Server, Active Directory, and Windows Desktop Search. (The OFS vision morphed into the Windows File System, aka WinFS, which was promised for Longhorn but removed from the feature list by the time it became Vista.) Apple bought NeXT in 1997 and got Steve Jobs with the deal; NeXTSTEP became the foundation of Mac OS X.

Thanks again to RoughlyDrafted.com for the image.

3. Silicon Film EFS-1
At the end of the Digital Imaging Marketing Association (DIMA) show in February 1998, a company called Imagek announced its Electronic Film System unit, the EFS-1, to a small group of journalists. The EFS-1 aimed to fulfill the dreams of many professional photographers: In principle, the EFS-1 would act as a replacement for a 35mm film cartridge in any camera, allowing anyone to use their existing, familiar photo equipment to take digital pictures.

Despite the considerable engineering challenges that the company faced, Imagek expected to have a working demo unit a few months later, and a sub-$1000 unit on store shelves a few months after that.

Observers greeted the announcement with some skepticism, and to no one's surprise Imagek missed its target dates. However, it did release specs, some of which were admittedly modest: The (e)Film cartridge had a 1.3-megapixel CMOS sensor, able to fit 24 1280-by-1024-resolution uncompressed images in its on-board memory before the user needed to offload them to a computer or a CompactFlash card via the included (e)Port carrier. (The entire hardware and software package was now collectively referred to as the EFS-1.)

Because of the sensor size, the captured image would be only about 35 percent of the camera's full frame. And forget universality for the time being: The EFS-1 worked with just seven Canon and Nikon cameras.

Aside from a name change (to Silicon Film), some Web site updates, and a few sample images, nothing new came out of the company until the 2001 PMA show, when Silicon Film publicly demonstrated the EFS-1, exactly three years after the initial announcement.

Skeptics were less inclined to mutter "vaporware," but the projected June release date passed with no product to be seen. That September, Silicon Film suspended operations when Irvine Sensors, a 51 percent shareholder of Silicon Film, withheld further funding over problems with European environmental standards. Irvine Sensors' press release also obliquely noted "present market circumstances," which may have been a polite way of referring to the falling prices and increasing quality of digital cameras, including SLRs.

Silicon Film's last gasp directly addressed that last point: The EPS10-SF, announced the following year, produced 10-megapixel images while supporting more cameras and providing a 2.5-fps burst rate and an LCD preview screen. And then the company was gone.

2. Project Xanadu
In 1960, Ted Nelson first came up with the term "hypertext," which he envisioned as something different from what it has come to mean.

Hypertext as implemented now is unidirectional; you can link to a document without the document owner ever knowing. If the other party moves or renames the document, the link breaks. Nelson's hypertext—which he now calls "deep electronic literature," to avoid confusion—was meant to be bidirectional, so that two linked documents would stay linked, regardless of how they were moved or copied. More to the point, such a setup would allow for side-by-side comparison, version management, and an automatic copyright management system in which an author could set a royalty rate for all or parts of a document; linking would initiate the necessary transactions. In 1967, Nelson came up with a name for his project: Xanadu.

The first working code for Xanadu was produced in 1972, and since then the project has largely been marked by near-misses and flirtations with bankruptcy. It is still remarkable for a number of reasons, however.

First, of course, is Nelson's tenacity: He and his shifting teams haven't stopped working on Xanadu for nearly fifty years, making it one of the few existing computing projects to span longer than the entire history of personal computers and computer networking.

Second is that, even with the advent and popularization of hypertext as we know it, especially on the Web, Nelson's ambitious vision hasn't wavered. (He says the Web as it is "trivializes our original hypertext model.") Third is that, even after all this time, with his undeniable influence on the way we work and play today, he is still, as he puts it, "not a tekkie."

It's also worth noting that Project Xanadu isn't completely vaporware. Nelson released the Xanadu source code in 1999, and XanaduSpace 1.0 released last year.

1. Apple W.A.L.T. and VideoPad
Before there was an iPhone—in fact, before there was an "i" anything—Apple attempted two ventures into "portable" communications. Developed between 1991 and 1993 in conjunction with BellSouth, Apple's W.A.L.T. (Wizzy Active Lifestyle Telephone, easily the worst name the company has ever come up with) was a tablet that doubled as a PDA; its killer app was the ability to send and receive faxes from the screen. The W.A.L.T. was never released to the general public.

Tenacious as ever, Apple offered up the possibility of a new portable videophone/PDA concept at 1995's MacWorld Expo. The Newton-like VideoPad three-in-one prototype combined a cell phone, PDA, and videophone, and (get this) sported an integrated CD-ROM drive. While the idea of holding a phone with parts of a CD-ROM unit sticking out of the sides was a little questionable, it was more ambitious than the W.A.L.T. It too failed to pass the prototype stage, however, and Apple would stay away from telephones until 2007. Of course, we all know what happened then.

Honorable Mentions

Apple Copland
While "Pink" continued to slowly run aground as Apple/IBM's Taligent, Apple still found itself needing an operating system that took a great leap forward from System 7.5. Code-named Copland, this new operating system was to include preemptive multitasking (the type of multitasking we enjoy today, versus the less-efficient cooperative multitasking that earlier versions of the Mac system software offered); a full-color, shaded interface (up to that point, Macintosh GUIs still echoed their black and white origins); and multiuser capabilities. As time progressed Copland picked up more planned features, such as QuickDraw GX, themes, and user interface improvements, while the development team's productivity dwindled, bogged down by the increasing requirements and the need to get a growing number of developers up to speed.

In 1996, Apple—most notably, CEO Gil Amelio—was referring to Copland in public as the forthcoming System 8, and the usual prerelease hype—including trade-show demos, T-shirts, and other swag—got into gear. Apple eventually had to give up on the unworkable Copland, with its technologies only starting to appear in Mac OS 8. Apple got its great leap forward a few years later with Mac OS X.

Sky Commuter Cars
What are the persistent, defining visions of the future? Marauding mutants, to be sure, but also jetpacks and flying cars. Though the jetpacks are (mostly) on hold, researchers continue to tease us by working on various kinds of flying cars, envisioning a utopia of uncluttered roadways and conveniently forgetting the first 20 minutes of The Fifth Element.

One such attempt was the N2001C—the Sky Commuter car, a personal vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) plane designed by Flight Innovations. The details are sketchy, but the upshot is that after more than $6,000,000 in funding, the project was shelved. An eBay auction claiming to be of the last Sky Commuter prototype in existence caused some excitement (and raised some skeptical eyebrows) in January, but you can see one yourself by taking a trip to the Halsons Helicopter Museum in Tennessee.

Oh, well. No Sky Commuter, but at least there's still the Falx Stalker or the Transition (a light aircraft that folds its wings to drive on the road) to look forward to.

XtremMac MacThrust G4
In 1999, Swedish company Xtrem promised the XtremMac MacThrust G4—an overclocked Macintosh (a rarity in the Mac world) that could hit 1.2 GHz. There was just one problem: The fastest PowerPC G4 processor at the time was a mere 500 MHz. Xtrem claimed that it could achieve the incredible speed increase by exploiting existing features in Apple's hardware, and, of course, by cooling the daylights out of the CPU.

Xtrem missed its August shipping date, and then its January shipping date. By February the company had relaunched its Web site and retrenched on specs: The new XtremMac would hit only 1.066 GHz. Meanwhile, Mac G4s had climbed to 733 MHz, and the few Mac users who weren't skeptics collectively shrugged. If it ever got released, no one noticed.

[Originally written for PC World.]

Returning to the Source of "Otaku"

When an anime fan proudly describes themselves as an otaku I usually wince a little. I realize that language evolves, especially around loan words—the term anime is a classic example—but I've always found it odd that a word with such negative connotations in Japanese is worn as a badge of honour in the English-speaking world. I usually point to the case of Tsutomu Miyazaki (no relation to director Hayao Miyazaki), who molested, killed and mutilated four girls in the late 1980s. Among his massive video collection were pornographic anime and slasher films, and he was something of an outsider; the Japanese public linked the term otaku with dangerously antisocial behaviour.

However, the term existed before then; less sensationally, but still negative. Over on Néojaponisme, Matt Alt has translated the first two parts of a series of articles in which the term "otaku" was first applied to extremely obsessed fans with few social skills. The articles, written by Akio Nakamori, first appeared in 1983, and you can read them in "What Kind of Otaku Are You?" and "Can Otaku Love Like Normal People?".

[Cross-posted from Frames Per Second.]

The "Censored Eleven" Problem

For years (and years, and years) I've been reading the same tired arguments about racist cartoons, particularly those that use black stereotypes. It's a problem that's as old as cartoons themselves; John Stuart Blackton's Humorous Phases of Funny Faces, considered the first cartoon short, made fun of blacks and Jews (Blackton's lightning sketches include two images labelled "Coon" and "Cohen") in 1906, and the image of big-lipped, Stepin Fetchit-inspired characters didn't lose steam in popular American cartoons for another half a century.

The problem began when networks stopped airing these cartoons in their regular lineups, and larger companies were slow to include them in videocassette (and now DVD) compilations unedited. Not that they were never released—I still have my Tex Avery laserdiscs with Uncle Tom's Cabana and a handful of shorts that use blackface gags, for example—but some Warner Bros. cartoons have been considered so over the line that they haven't been aired on TV for decades, and never released by Warner Bros. on any kind of home video. These shorts have acquired a mythical status, and a name: The Censored Eleven.

Talk of these shorts (and similar ones not so blessed as to be tagged with such a dramatic moniker) invariably brings up discussions of the shorts' historical significance, the fact that they were made in a different era, and, at some point, an exhortation to the rightsholders that the shorts should be released unedited. My longstanding complaint about these arguments is that, for the most part, it's a bunch of white guys standing around arguing about what black people should and shouldn't find offensive. (Books like That's Enough, Folks: Black Images in Animated Cartoons, 1900-1960 are a step toward rectifying that problem, as well as the more recent The Colored Cartoon: Black Representation in American Animated Short Films, 1907-1954, which I'll be reviewing soon; I've also done my bit with essays on the subject and, most recently, a 2006 guest blogging stint on ReFrederator.)

In light of a recent re-emergence of the discussion, Thad Komorowski has nailed the other complaint that I've never fully given voice to: that many cartoon fans, in their desire to own these films, have bent over backwards to claim that these films are not racist. Because, let's face it, they most emphatically are. If a joke is being made with the understanding that something is funny because a character is black, then it's racist. It's a pretty simple equation. (And please spare me the "I have a black friend who loves these cartoons" argument; I think Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs is one of the funniest, snappiest, and most brilliant cartoons Bob Clampett ever directed, but denying that it's entirely built around racist imagery is like denying gravity.)

I am more than pleased that someone has come out and called it like it is, and urge you to read Thad's frank commentary. And hey, if you've been itching to see the Censored Eleven for yourself, he's also posted them there for your edification.

[Cross-posted from Frames Per Second.]

Back to the Sutures II

So it turns out that writing is therapeutic, just in a different way than I thought. Shortly after writing about my newly painful experience with the sutures, I remembered that two of the questions I would get asked every few days in hospital were "Any pain around the Broviac?" and "Any redness around the line?" (Broviac is the brand name of my catheter.) The act of writing the message made me realize that—duh!—it hurt and it was red.

So it was back to the hospital the following morning, hoping I didn't have some kind of infection. After a few pressure tests ("Does it hurt when I press here?" "No." "Does it hurt when I press here?" "No." "Does it hurt when I press—" "OW!" "Okay.") the dressing was carefully peeled back and we got a good look at the entry point. It turned out that all the sutures had worked themselves out before; what was bugging me was crusty dried skin, some of which had broken off and was irritating the skin. (This goes back to the whole thing about not being able to properly clean the area around the catheter.) The area was cleaned, and the relief was almost instant. The new dressing was applied, the redding has diminished (not not entirely), and everything's cool.

Top 5 Animated Earth Day Shows

Say "environmentally themed animation" to most people and they'll think of FernGully: The Last Rainforest or Captain Planet—both well-intentioned, but as subtle and as thrilling to experience as a boot to the head. Presented in alphabetical order, here are five titles that get it right; essential viewing not just on Earth Day, but every day.

The Lorax
When we talk about Warner alumna who worked with Dr. Seuss, we tend to mention Chuck Jones and, er, that's it. But it was Hawley Pratt who directed The Lorax, the 1972 adaptation of the good doctor's book from the year earlier. In it, the Lorax—a typically Seussian odd-looking, oddly coloured creature who says he "speaks for the trees," tries to convince an industrialist not to chop down the Truffula trees, which he uses to make a unique form of clothing called Thneeds.

The industrialist doesn't listen, and the Thneeds take off. His small shop becomes larger, which leads to the construction of larger factories and more roadwork, which leads to increasing destruction of the forest and the air—and eventually, the growth of a whole city, which just makes the problem worse. Futile though it is, the Lorax protests the whole time. Near the end of the story, the industrialist chops down the last tree and realizes he's not only ended his business, but destroyed the very reason he came to the forest in the first place—and the Lorax sadly picks himself up (literally) and flies away.

The Lorax is pads the original story with reasonably entertaining songs, gags and bits of business to bring it up to a half-hour special, and it captures the Seuss look pretty well. While it's comparatively strident—"greedy industrialist" is all you need to know about the antagonist—it's still a striking look at how we can carelessly consume and destroy resources when we're not careful.

The Man Who Planted Trees
Frédéric Back believes passionately in the need to protect and co-exist with the environment, and his most moving testament to that belief is his 1987 masterpiece The Man Who Planted Trees, an adaptation of a 1953 French short story. In the story, a man visits an abandoned valley in France three times. The first time is before World War I, when the valley is dry and desolate, and he meets a young shepherd who is planting acorns; the second time is between both world wars, when the young trees are starting to dot the landscape; and the third time is after World War II, when the valley is a green, lush paradise, and a small village has sprung up around it.

The story itself, in which one man selflessly and patiently turns emptiness into a thriving, living community, is inspiring, but what makes it work as a film is Back's method. Using coloured pencils and frosted cels (like traditional acetate cells, but with a tooth to them so that traditional but inkless drawing tools can be used on them), he made each frame a gorgeous illustration, with each one cross-dissolving into the next. When we return to the valley-as-Eden, that technique serves to make every leaf on every tree burst with life. When we hear that our actions have far-reaching implications, it's usually when we're being warned not to do something. When you see the forest in The Man Who Planted Trees flowing across the screen, you realize that there's a positive aspect to that as well.

See a clip and storyboard images from The Man Who Planted Trees

My Neighbor Totoro
In 1950s Japan, Mei and Satsuki move to the countryside with their father, as they wait for their hospitalized mother to recover from her illness. From the moment they set foot in the house, the girls discover (magic?) forest creatures large and small, who seem to be presided over by the largest of three creatures, that seem like a jovial cross between a cat and a bear; Mei calls them Totoro.

Not much more needs to be said, because if you haven't seen Totoro, you've probably heard of it (and, really, should make the time to go see it.) It's the 1988 film that made Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli icons in Japan (literally, as Totoro now graces the Ghibli logo on every movie opener), and, after some time, abroad as well. The three Totoro are probably the Ghibli characters you're most likely to see pop up in the background of comics and animation, as artists the world over pay homage.

The reason for all the love is simple: Totoro is a gentle film that is as much about the joys of childhood as it is about the beauty of nature. Linking expertly realized scenes—of napping in a forest, of skipping over a creek, or of savouring the night breeze through the trees—to our own memories makes a better case for preserving forests than any amount of brow-beating. The Japanese public apparently agreed, and Totoro has become a symbol, both official and unofficial, of its environmental movement.

Princess Mononoke
Nine years after Totoro, Ghibli released its flip side: Miyazaki's look a fifteenth-century Japan where the powerful forest spirits still walk the Earth with both majesty and terror. The young prince Ashitaka is banished from his village when his arm is scarred in an encounter with a deranged boar god, and during his travels he encounters San—the demon princess of the title—and Lady Eboshi, who has founded and runs Iron Town on the edge of the forest. San has literally been raised by wolves (or, more accurately, wolf gods), and is constantly sabotaging Iron Town's operations, as their manufacturing facilities are encroaching further on the forest.

Ashitaka, and the audience, quickly learns that things aren't as black and white as they may seem. Lady Eboshi has taken in lepers, prostitutes, and other people cast off from society and given them a home; by mining and refining the iron she's been able to keep Iron Town self-sufficient. San and many of the forest creatures see humanity as a threat, an ever-reproducing virus that needs to be destroyed for their safety. The result is the beginning of a bloody war, with interested outside parties looking for opportunities and Ashitaka risking life and limb to keep things from escalating past the point of no return.

Princess Mononoke carries two messages within it, both rarely said in environmentally themed films. First is that if you push nature too hard, nature will push back harder. The second echoes a sentiment spoken by John Muir, godfather to the American environmental movement: "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything in the universe." The fatal error that is often made in the movie, and in real life, is that humanity is somehow separated from nature.

Respire
French group Mickey 3D's 2003 CD Tu vas pas mourir de rire (You Won't Die Laughing) is full of politically conscious songs set to toe-tapping music. Its second track, Respire (Breathe) is the basis for a CGI music video that features, for the most part, nothing but a young girl running barefoot through an open field, skipping through creeks and climbing trees, all under a gorgeous blue sky. The laconically delivered lyrics speak of what man has done to his world, and how action needs to be taken by everyone, right now.

It's the end of the video that brings everything together as, with a Twilight-Zoneish twist, we discover that things aren't what they first seemed. Frankly, I find this scenario all too plausible. Consider Respire a warning you can dance to. Watch the video and decide for yourself.

Where to Get It
Buy The Lorax DVDs and more from Amazon.com
Buy The Man Who Planted Trees DVDs and more from Amazon.com
Buy My Neighbor Totoro DVDs and more from Amazon.com
Buy Princess Mononoke DVDs and more from Amazon.com
Buy Respire (part of the Imagina Trips Vol. 2 compilation; PAL, Region 2) on DVD from Amazon.fr
Buy Tu vas pas mourir de rire on CD from Amazon.com

Previously on Frames Per Second
Imagina Trips Vol. 2 review

[Cross-posted from Frames Per Second.]

Back to the Sutures

I went to the hospital today for a quick blood test ("bloods" for short). Since they let me out early and everything, they want to keep an eye on the bloods to keep an eye on my neutrophils count, white blood count, hemoglobins and platelets. When I left on Friday my neutrophils were rising slowly; my white blood count was rising nicely; my hemoglobins were okay; and my platelets were low enough that they needed to be topped off, but nothing critical.

Since it's Passover much of the hospital is a ghost town. I stopped by 7NW (my ward; that's "seven northwest") to say hi to the gang, and checked out my labs after they'd hit the computer system. The only thing I really cared about was my neutrophils count—I'd like to stop wearing masks when I go to the store, thank you—and they're only at 0.4. To frame that properly, I'd usually be sent home only once I hit 0.5, would be considered mildly neutropenic at 1.0, and non-neutropenic at 1.2.

Anyway, after I had my bloods done I had my chest catheter dressing changed, because the dressing was starting to peel already. This has happened the last few times it's been changed; I suspect it's because I'm sweating more with the warmer weather, increased physical activity and recent recurrence of the night sweats.

While that was being done, the nurse working on me removed some of the sutures from my lines. When the catheter is installed, it's pretty quick surgery, but it's still surgery. That means sutures to close the hole around the tube as best as possible until the skin heals. I didn't think about sutures when I first got the catheter in—who would?—and when the gauze was finally removed I noticed what looked like wires sticking out of my chest. That is, in fact, what they were; these sutures appear to be fine stainless steel. Parts of them were eventually cut away during regular maintenance (aside from changing the dressing, the lines also get flushed to clear away blood clots and other buildup, and the claves at the end get changed), but the rest are still inside—think of snipping the threads that hold a button in place on your shirt from only on side.

The sutures that are inside gradually work themselves out of the body. I haven't mentioned it until now because it's a painless, dull process. Every so often I'd look down and notice that the sutures had come out a little more, wrapped around the catheter tubing. When they got long and annoying, they were trimmed.

It took four months, but the first bunch of sutures finally came out in their entirety today. Before my new dressing was placed, the nurse carefully removed them from the tubing, threw them away and cleaned the tubing. I looked down and noticed other sutures were starting to work their way out.

Now, normally when I get my dressing changed it feels uncomfortable for a few hours. When the old dressing is removed the skin is cleaned with Stanhexidine (chlorhexidine gluconate, 2%) antibacterial solution, which is cold, and air-dried. The new dressing is placed, usually a different way from the old one, and the lines are arranged differently on my chest. (Each nurse has a different style, it also lets the skin breathe and, I guess, keeps the lines from settling into one shape.) So while my nerve endings get used to a new arrangement for another week, it sometimes itches or tingles until everything settles in.

Today, I noticed it was actually feeling kind of uncomfortable—and, more alarmingly, localized. When it started to get really irritating I realized the pain was right at the tube's point of entry, which is the prime spot for any kind of infection. I was starting to get antsy about that possibility when I noticed that the new sutures had actually come out further. Vicky noticed that the spot just to the side of the entry point was red (how she spotted that through the dressing from a distance, I'll never know), and when I touched it I could feel the threads through the skin.

What appears to be happening is that these sutures are working themselves out at a faster rate—I never would have noticed such a difference in a matter of hours before—and as a result it's irritating my skin. So now there's a sharp little pain in my chest every so often as they do their little mambo. I'll have to make sure they don't poke through the dressing, too. Fun.

Google Maps Mashup Makes London an Open Book

Finally, a Google Maps mashup I can get into. Tracking new big box stores, U.S. lakes, and that old standby, celebrity maps? Beyond the first bits of noodling, well... meh.

But local history, geography, and especially reading -- now we're talking. Booktrust, a British organization devoted to encouraging reading, has cooked up a mashup that combines geography and literature. Get London Reading positions thumbnails of over 400 books related to or that take place in London over their relevant locations, right down to the relevant street corner. (It's like a significantly less creepy version of the cabbie's tour of the city in Eddie Campbell's From Hell, the source of the Johnny Depp movie.) Each thumbnail has a popup with a user-modifiable summary.

This is a classic win-win situation. Publishers get a boost from people who are curious about books written about where they live. The City of London gets a boost from tourists -- or even its own citizens -- having more reasons to explore and learn about the city. Avid readers get great suggestions for new reading material. (Considering my creaking shelves of as yet unread books, maybe that last one isn't a win.)

People respond to seeing their hometown represented in the media, especially when it's done right. My first thought after seeing Get London Reading was that I'd like to see something similar for here in Montreal, though it would probably be dominated by Kathy Reichs and Mordecai Richler. My second thought was that, given the amount of Hollywood films that are shot in this city, it would be kind of cool to show where different movies were shot -- though the warehouse that served as 300's set might be anticlimactic.

Going back to books, this also makes for a good educational tool. The constant lament of the student, especially in high school, is that they can't relate to what they learn. Putting dramatic literature and history in the context of their own neighbourhoods might do more to pique their interest than field trips to museums and forts.

What really struck me, however, was how something like this could -- no, should -- be an extension to cities' existing tourism strategy. It works well because it's maintained by its user base; do a good job with the initial tools and subsequent promotion and it can become almost self-sustaining. It's been 26 years since my last visit to London and I'm not sure when my next one will be, but I know I'll be taking some time out to do a little literary exploration the next time I'm there.

[Cross-posted from PC World; thanks to Shiny Shiny for the link.]

Sinkin' in the Bathtub

I was talking to one of my neighbours this evening—I haven't seen her in, what, five months?—and she said that it must be nice to be home and getting back into my old routines. Which I thought was funny, because I'd already decided that today I was going to write about one of my favourite routines that's changed since my diagnosis, and will stay changed for quite some time.

I love being covered in water. Invigorating showers that stimulate the senses, languorous baths with a glass of rum and Miles Davis on the stereo, laps in the pool—except for being rained on, being submerged is one of my favourite experiences, and one I'm happy to enjoy every day. You can tune a shower to your mood, say, with a quick, warm shower to clear the cobwebs in the morning with a short burst of cold water at the end for an invigorating snap when you've got a full day ahead, or a cool stream after a long bike ride. Since I work at home I usually shower in the afternoon to re-energize myself and think through things without any distractions. (In fact, it was during just such a shower that I conceived of Frames Per Second and had my first encounter with tachycardia.)

I'm kind of fixated on showers right now because the whole experience has changed for me. One of the last "normal" showers I had was at around 5:00 a.m. on December 17, 2007. That was when I was so cold that even two quilts, a huge cup of tea, a hot water bag, and Vicky and Max's huddled bodies couldn't get me to stop shivering for a half an hour. I got into the shower, made it as hot as I could stand it, and stayed in there until I felt I was warm enough to put on three layers of clothing and get to emergency at the nearest hospital. What I didn't know was that (a) about 36 hours later I would be diagnosed with leukemia, and (b) I would have two more showers in the next few days, and then I wouldn't shower again for almost a month—and that the act of showering would be very different.

When I was admitted for treatment, one of the first things the nurses did was stick a bunch of IVs in my arm. These were to administer my chemotherapy drugs and to keep me hydrated. A few days later a doctor installed a venous chest catheter in my right pecs—a pair of tubes (or "lines") that enters my chest a few inches above my nipple, proceeds up to my clavicle, and then goes into a vein leading straight to my heart. The lines that dangle outside—they extend about ten inches—make it easy to give me medication or draw blood without poking me with a needle. The tradeoff in convenience is extra caution. I mean, there's a hole in my chest. That means I have to be extra-careful not to get it infected, and that includes not getting it wet. (It's not like the entry point is exposed; it's actually covered by a plastic dressing about four inches square. But if that gets wet, it'll peel.)

So a quick dip in the pool is right out. So is a hot bath. And showering now requires planning.

In hospital, I couldn't just shower whenever I wanted to. Because no one wants any kind of diseases transmitted, the shower (there are two in the ward I was in) has to be cleaned first, so I had to wait until housekeeping could get to it after I asked—and this was assuming I wasn't neutropenic (when they didn't want me showering even if it was clean, just in case). Then, depending on what I was being administered through the IV, I had to wait until the dose ended. Then a nurse had to disconnect me from the pump, flush any lines that were being used with saline and heperin and clamp them off. Then it was time to protect the catheter by taping a plastic blood bag to my chest with medical tape as a splash guard.

Even then, I couldn't just shower freely. Normal movements (like, say, soaping) cause the skin to shift, and the tape eventually starts to wrinkle and come loose. Besides, medical tape isn't exactly waterproof. So showering meant being careful not to get the right part of my chest wet, even when washing my hair (or, more accurately, my scalp). After the shower I'd take off the blood bag, check to make sure I didn't get the dressing wet, and then eventually I'd be reattached to the pump.

The chest catheter is still in my chest, even though I'm home. I'll still need it for my regular blood tests and forthcoming transfusions. If I'm readmitted for chemo as I was twice before, it'll still be needed. It can also be used for the bone marrow transplant. That means that for at least, oh, let's say a year, showering is more a matter of procedure than pleasure. I don't have to worry about being disconnected from a pump now, but I need help in the prep—being right-handed, and with the blood bag needing to be placed partly under my right arm, I haven't quite got the coordination to tape it on myself; I need Vicky's help to do that until I can figure something out.

Because this is such a process, it also means I shower less frequently. When I'm home I sponge myself with a hot, wet towel on alternate days. When I'm in the hospital, I can go for days without showering, and sometimes circumstances make it worse. Back during my first chemo, the migraines and other problems I was having kept me from showering for weeks. It felt good to start scrubbing the dirt off, but I've realized since then that the lack of daily showers, along with the parts I can't properly soap and scrub clean because they're too close to (or under) the dressing, mean that I won't be truly, completely clean for quite some time.

5 Habits for Greener Computing

With Earth Day approaching you're probably thinking about the different ways you do your bit for the environment. Okay, so maybe you drive a bit more than you should, but you put your blue box out on the curb every week, right? Well, if you're reading this it's a pretty safe bet you're using a computer, and computers generate waste in all kinds of ways. But by just changing a few habits, you can keep more stuff out of landfills, save energy, and even tuck a few extra dollars in your wallet. Here are five ideas to get you started.

1. Save paper and ink

I get a lot of press releases and other printed documents I never read more than once (if ever), so when I can get away with it I print on the reverse side of these, reserving my pristine sheets for letters and other important documents. The savings are tangible: I've bought exactly one 500-sheet pack of paper in the last two years.

You can save more paper by shrinking your text and printing two pages side by side on one sheet of paper, if your printer driver allows it. (You'd better have good eyesight, though.) On Windows XP, choose Print, then choose Preferences or Print Setup. Look for an option called 'Pages per Sheet,' and set it to 2.

If you print a lot from the Web, then you should absolutely download a copy of the ad-supported GreenPrint World so you can trim the stuff you don't need printed, which saves both paper and ink (or toner).

You can also save ink—easily the most expensive part of any inkjet printer—by printing in draft mode whenever possible, or using a utility like Inksaver.

2. Stop wasting CDs/DVDs

I can't count the amount of times someone has burned a disc for me just to give me, say, 100 MB of data, leaving the remaining 600 MB (or, worse, 4-plus GB) unused. Rewritable discs cost more and take a little longer to burn, but they're perfect for passing data back and forth without throwing out all that metal and plastic.

When you're done with your discs you can recycle them by sending them to GreenDisk for responsible destruction and reuse. There's a small fee--$6.95 for boxes 20 lbs. or lighter—but you can also cram in any other electronic waste you have lying around. While GreenDisk guarantees that the material on your discs won't fall into the wrong hands, the extra-cautious can protect their data beforehand using Aleratec's CD/DVD Shredder. Despite the name, the CD/DVD Shredder pounds thousands of tiny pits into the surface of a disc, rendering it unreadable. Aleratec doesn't sell them anymore, but they do turn up on Amazon and eBay.

3. Tweak your power settings

If you're like me, your computer is on all day, but you don't work on it continuously. Turning it on and off isn't an option, but a quick trip to the Windows control panel's Power Options can shave your usage down a bit. There, you can set your monitor and hard disks to power down when you haven't been using the computer for a while. It only takes a second for them to power up again, so you can take that time to get comfortable in your chair.

Most important, you can set the computer itself to go to sleep or hibernate after a certain period of inactivity. Sleep mode is a low-power mode, and like the hard disks and monitor, has everything up and running in just a few moments when you want to get going again. Hibernation actually switches the computer off, but saves your current work environment first. As you'd expect, waking the computer up from hibernation takes a bit longer.

Tip: Windows XP SP2 sometimes has a problem getting hibernation to work when you have more than 1 GB of RAM—paradoxically, it generates an error message saying that you don't have enough resources. A quick visit to Microsoft's Knowledge Base provides a patch that fixes it right up.

By the way, these tips also apply to your portable devices. MP3 players, cell phones, PDAs , and handheld games have settings for powering down or adjusting their screens, Bluetooth, or Wi-Fi. Switching off what you don't need (or even just turning down screen brightness) extends battery life, which means less recharging.

4. Turn it off!

Printers, scanners, speakers, monitors—your computer comes with a multitude of peripherals that will happily keep on sucking power even when the computer is switched off. It doesn't seem like much, but even an idling printer is a drain on your utility bill. The simple rule of thumb is to turn anything off when you're not using it. That includes turning off your monitor rather than letting it sit in low-power mode when the computer's off, and only turning on your printer when you actually have something to print.

The trouble is that some devices have hard-to-reach power buttons, or worse, no power buttons at all. Power bars like the Smart Strip and some of APC's SurgeArrest products can help: the Smart Strip switches off devices plugged into specific outlets when the computer is switched off, and several Professional SurgeArrest models have a few “always-on” outlets that deliver power even when they're switched off.

Also, don't forget to unplug your phone, camera or any other rechargeable device as soon as it's finished juicing up—even though the batteries are smart enough to stop drawing power when they're full, electricity is still being drawn through the cable. Some Nokia phones will even nag you to unplug them when they're done.

5. Find a new home for your old tech

So you're getting ready to upgrade to a new computer, but you've discovered you've got no room in the closet for the old one because it's already filled with a decade's worth of obsolete technology. What to do? One solution is to recycle you old gadgets by bringing them somewhere they'll be disposed of properly. You can find a list of services in your area by checking out Earth 911's website, which tells you where to dispose of everything from batteries to toner cartridges to that 386 you've had knocking around since the first George Bush was in office.

Better still, you can Freecycle your old equipment. Freecycle is a network of local mailing lists (there are over 4,000 globally, from Andorra to the Virgin Islands) for people who want to give stuff away, or are looking for free stuff. Just post a message about what you want to give, and someone will probably offer to take it off your hands—and isn't finding your old computer a home that better than just having it dismantled?

Whichever method you choose, don't forget to wipe your hard drive clean first. Use a utility like File Shredder to delete any sensitive data from your hard disk before it goes through your door.

[A slightly different version of this appeared on PC World.]